Numerous systems have evolved and are rapidly continuing to evolve for using the Internet as a fountain of information and contacts to impart information of all kinds to computer users, leaving it, however, up to the individual users and their individual resourcefulness or talents to ferrit out the sources of desired information, finding cross-referencing sources, discovering appropriate world-wide web pages, and discovering e-mail and databases and directories and other addresses and identifications. While amazing and exciting in its scope, this process is far from organized, is most time-consuming, with much trial and error and hit or miss, and is largely unintegrated and somewhat user-unfriendly and often discouraging.
Attempts have recently been started at least to simplify topic information and source identification with so-called "object" or icon ("button") selection as with code concepts such as Java (Web Page URL reference http://java.sun.com/doc/index.html). Individual companies have also come up with solutions that link selected communication media together (such as e-mail software and web-page software) in the form of a suite of applications, but still without enabling universal linking of all of the available services through a new interpretation of the universal functionality of such services and their interrelationships as provided by the present invention. For example, in connection with Volatac Iphone (http://www.pulver.com/vocaltec/), service is broken down by topics with limited voice and chat communication and enabling exchange of files over the Internet the topics being used primarily to enable temporal location of similar-interest parties but not for putting resources in a growing framework and adding to topic information resources.
The problem of totally organizing and integrating all the varied communication tools and archives therefor, however, and for the myriad of different possible informational topics of interest (such as the primary communication functions of e-mail, real-time communications and personal information gathering, web access, multi-media representations, custom software, instantaneous messaging, etc.) has, until the advent of the present invention, remained largely unsolved and even largely unapproached.
The present invention is believed to provide a breakthrough in this area, opening up for the first time, the possibility, for example, of completely user-friendly regional, national and global distance education and information-sharing and supplementing such information with individual user contributions to a growing information resource; and with communication with all of the "tools" of varied communication techniques--messaging, archiving and accessing functions all assembled and organized and integrated for user-friendly, self-contained universal use at each user computer station--providing the opportunity for the first real time simplified sharing and networking of, for example, all the similar schools of the land or the globe, or other common interest and facility groups over the Internet--regionally, nationally, and world-wide--and as distinguished from the teleconferencing technology approach.
As earlier stated, an important application of the methodology of the invention is to networking educational instructions and providing distance learning and interchange over the Internet. A brief review of this useage may thus be appropriate before describing preferred implementations.